Climbers: A Novel

by M. John Harrison

  I cornered him on the landing outside his flat. It had been a long hot day and a foul smell hung in the air. Over his thin sloping shoulder I could see into his front room. Thick piles of hair-clippings lay on the pocked green lino. He cut his hair himself, and often left it there for days on end. Through his window was a view of the road, where a few children were playing desultorily on bicycles. On the wall opposite, one of them had chalked, ‘Whoever redes this is a cunt.’

  ‘You must never give it fishbones,’ I explained patiently. ‘It will choke on them.’

  ‘I can’t stop it stealing, can I?’ he complained. ‘Cats eat fish. The poor little thing.’

  He licked his lips and watched me. He had on a cotton vest, wrinkled over a pot belly peculiarly swollen and hard. His arms were thin – though they had once been muscular – the skin loose and sore in the creases of his elbow. I noticed that his hands were trembling slightly. Suddenly I had had enough of him.

  ‘You know bloody well it isn’t the cat that’s stealing!’ I shouted in his face. I was trembling too. ‘It’s ill. It’s ill, you stupid old idiot!’

  I stepped round him and went quickly through his door. I was practised at this. Every day I had to get my milk back, or look for my letters. I had caught him with my groceries. I had caught him with a dish of Kit-E-Kat Meat & Liver Dinner. ‘It’s filthy in here,’ I said. ‘Can’t you clean it up a bit? I can smell it from upstairs when you open the door.’ He came in behind me and stood in the twilight biting his lips, his weak eyes sliding sideways to the television screen, which showed a factory, a mechanical process of one sort or another, and then a man driving down a road on a housing estate.

  ‘And another thing,’ I said. ‘You can keep that thing turned down.’

  I prodded him in the stomach.

  He looked at me and swallowed. ‘If you do that I’ll shit myself,’ he said.

  ‘Christ.’

  I only ever went to Morecambe once.

  Even though it was late in the day the sky was like brass. I had been climbing all through July further up the coast. I remember the placid muddy water of the boating pool, beyond which rotting piles go out into some great slow tidal stream slipping past to join the Kent Channel; sleeping women on the sand, their dresses pulled up to expose their thighs to the thick hot light; the giant cone above the ice cream stall. In a fish restaurant they advertised ‘best butter’ on the bread. A man finished his meal then stared ahead with his mouth open while two teenage couples took snaps of each other across the table with a cheap camera. Music hung in the air in the amusement park, with diesel smoke and the smell of fried onions. ‘Blue Moon, now I’m no longer alone.’ A dog trotted by. Nobody was playing Catch-a-Duck.

  I felt relaxed and elated both at once. The heat, the smells, the music, the signs on the sea front might all have been one thing, one stimulus appealing to a simple sensory organ we all used to have but have now forgotten we possess.

  All the time Ed was there he dreamed of South America.

  At a BMC lecture in Lancaster two or three years earlier he had overheard the visiting speaker say, ‘Magnetic anomalies affected our compass . . .’ and then later the same evening ‘. . . at sunset, behind the Col Mirador.’ Attracted by these two strange half-sentences, which afterwards became joined in his mind, he started to read widely in mountaineering accounts of Cerro Torre, Roraima, the Towers of Paine; and to collect expensive early editions of Whymper and Shipton. ‘We put a camp in the lee of the small moraine there, and began to fix ropes.’ But he soon found it wasn’t the climbing that interested him so much as the unearthliness of the place itself.

  In 1895 evidence had turned up at Last Hope Inlet near Puerto Natales, Chile, of a ground-living sloth the size of a rhinoceros. Found in conjunction with human remains, it had died only recently. It had perhaps been domesticated. Only just discovered, it was only just extinct . . . in fact the Tehuelche Indians believed it could still be found alive. It was nocturnal, they said, covered with coarse hair; and it had huge hooked claws.

  Because of this blurring-together of geological and historical time, plants as well as animals teetered on the brink. ‘The puya,’ Ed read, ‘is a living fossil. With its inturned spines it can imprison and kill a small dog as easily as a bird. The Indians burn it wherever they find it, so that their young children are not at risk.’ The Andean landscapes, too, had a curious central equivocality: black ignimbrite plains above Ollague like spill from some vast recently abandoned mine: the refurbished pre-Inca irrigation canals near Machu Picchu, indistinguishable from mountain streams. Half-seen outlines, half-glimpsed possibilities; and to set against them, a desperate clarity of the air. Cerro Puntiagudo hung, with its snowfields like a feather necklace, in a sky blue enough to make your teeth ache.

  Ed never went there.

  He would have liked to do a climb in the Paine National Park. He thought of following the itinerary of the Hesketh-Prichard expedition, which at the turn of the century had gone in search of a living megatherium only to falter before it even reached Last Hope and turn for home furious and dispirited. He had always meant to go. Somehow he was never able to save the money; or, if he did, his friends let him down. The Falklands Crisis intervened. He turned to the television natural history programmes, where a chance alignment of rock peaks nearly broke his heart.

  The pictures were so clear. He caught his breath as the camera swooped up and burst over this ridge or that to reveal San Pedro, Licancabur or the Los Patos Pass beyond, then raced over flat and stony plains covered with strange tussocks of grass and fading into the purplish line of the volcanoes; or dwelt on the death of a guanaco foal beneath the Paine Towers. He blinked back tears at the sound of pan-pipes, because something in it brought the entire Andes to him like a scent on the wind. It was a kind of nostalgia, but for a place you have never been. Through the open window at night he heard not the funfair, though he could easily see its wheeling lights, but the wind lifting the soil off the stony terraces of the Inca Altiplano. He would tease the monkey gently with his forefinger, whispering to it, ‘We placed bolts in the Red Dierdre, the sandstone girdle, the exit ramps . . . The wooden box with the wireless set and microscope slides is missing . . . Today as we retreated from the ice bulge I felt so far away from home . . .’ Generally it was calmed by this, but sometimes instead it would be goaded into an infantile fury and race round the room screeching and chattering and tearing up his photographs.

  Taking a film out of his OM–I at mid-day in August, he would be ambushed by memories of the Atacama he had never seen.

  Punta Arenas lay in wait for him at the end of Morecambe pier.

  Always just out of sight, the sixty-metre ice cliffs of the San Rafael Glacier glittered in the sun, calving into a green and milky sea. Slowly he realised it was not the real South America he loved but some continent of his own invention.

  After Normal left High Adventure and moved to Huddersfield, where his wife had the offer of a local authority job that would support them both, there was nothing to keep me in Stalybridge. The work I was doing meant nothing to me. Normal got a house on an estate. Since he was the only person in the north I knew well, I thought I might as well go and rent a cheap cottage in one of the valleys that run down from the moors south and west of the town. I didn’t want to live on a housing estate.

  By that time my cat had died, though not from eating the old man’s fishbones. It ran in from the street one morning with the left side of its lower jaw broken, and lay sprawled and panting on the mat. The eye on that side had been pushed in, causing it to turn and lift its head irritably every so often, as if it could see something through it that wasn’t there. A car had run it over I suppose. Sick cats often hide in the garden or crouch all day just out of reach under a cupboard: but they always know when a human being is their only chance. I kept it alive for two or three days, even though the vet recommended putting it down. In the end I had to give up. While I was trying to get it to drink something it look
ed up at me, with the broken jaw making a kind of fragile snarl, and purred. I didn’t know whether this was from pain – out of some desperate failure of vocabulary – or affection. Either way I remembered it butting its forehead against mine after it had eaten its dinner, and I couldn’t bear that.

  When I left Stalybridge the old man was still going strong. Oddly enough he never seemed to understand that the cat was dead. For a long time afterwards I would hear him on the stairs in the evenings, calling ‘Puss! Puss!’, or in the mornings find a saucer of thin grey milk outside his door.

  FOUR

  Sankey’s View

  After each thaw the view from the upstairs window became much bleaker. The snow retreated to the edge of the fields and lay there piled up against the low stone walls. Everything had a curiously unfinished look. Sheep picked their way over the steep fields in single file, unnerved by the re-emergence of this forgotten landscape. The old poached places reappeared at gates, black against the bruised grass. Nothing could yet be said to be green. It was less quiet. Starlings sat up in the house gutters and on the telephone wires to do poor, cracked imitations of other birds; after each effort, sneers, whistles and a kind of rhythmical creaking or scraping noise broke out. Later every afternoon as the days grew longer, the sodium lights came on on the other side of the valley, grouped in twos and threes near farms, following the line of a road. In the fading light the wooded cloughs struck diagonally across the hillside, very black and immobile. The next time he looked up it had all gone quite black, and only the orange lights were left.

  FIVE

  March, in the End

  In the end March was useless.

  We weren’t getting the weather, Bob Almanac said. Without that the year was in abeyance, its whole business untransactable. We raced into the dazzling sun of the cold mornings, looking for signs that the door was swinging open for us. But a grey light lay on the beech trees, and the walls and farmhouses had the bleached look sunlight gives them deep in the winter. One day I saw a warm tobacco-brown haze on the moors to the south of Buxton.

  ‘It looks nice.’

  ‘Wait till you get out of the car. It’ll freeze your bollocks off. What’s the capital of Louisiana?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I thought you were educated.’

  The sun had always gone in by the time we got where we were going. The rock was bitter. Down in Staffordshire knuckles of it break out of the tops of the ridges in the mist, like the rocks in a Hammer film. The wind sweeps up from the Potteries over isolated farms where they are committing incest or parricide or staring into an empty cup listening to the abandoned machinery and banging gates outside.

  ‘What’s it like up there?’

  ‘Piss wet through.’

  ‘I mean, what’s the climbing like?’

  ‘All right if you’re a duck.’

  Bits of hail bounced along the slanting ledges like bone dice. After half an hour it settled in. It melted on the holds and from each one a little dribble of cold water started down the dry lichenous rock like a tear. Another Saturday fucked.

  Smashed black blocks of rock balanced on one another like the remains of some civilisation whose observances grew so monolithic that in the end there was nothing to do but fall back into error, decline, barbarism. Easy enough to say what sends you away from here feeling so defeated. The weather, the moor, the greenish lichen on everything. Everything turns to paste when you touch it, says Bob Almanac, disgustedly scratching his head. Even the bones are green here, dead sheep scattered empty-socketed at the bottom of a stony gully. The climbs seem wilful. You ebb away into the valley.

  ‘Clocks change soon then.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘What do you mean: why? You great wazzock, the clocks change soon. It’ll be British Summer Time in a week!’

  ‘Oh. I thought you said, “Pog’s changed his tune.” ’

  ‘Who’s Pog?’

  I ran over Black Hill every morning to keep fit. For three days the valleys were full of freezing fog. From above you could see it lying pure white and motionless in the sun. Going down into it you found it grey, without comfort. A tree stood on the interface, bare and thorny. Inside, frost covered everything: before you had run a mile it had formed in your hair and beard, on the fibres of your clothes. Distances were shortened, sounds muffled. You went on in silence and the sheep lifted their heads to stare.

  I was still at the indoor wall once or twice a week. I always went on Tuesday or Wednesday, in the afternoon when I would be unlikely to find other climbers there. The problems seemed as hard as they had done in January, but I thought I was getting stronger. I wasn’t panicking so much, either, when things went wrong. After half an hour or so I would sit on the floor flexing my fingers and listening to the weightlifters who worked in an area near the wall. (Climbers had been forbidden this area because they had sneaked into it so often without paying.) They groaned like invalids. They addressed their apparatus, with all its springs and counterweights, like lovers. They moved off deeper into it, browsing placidly, so that you saw them like elephants or oxen through a screen of trees.

  Sometimes they smiled at me patiently, wondering perhaps why anybody so thin would come here at all.

  Waiting for some signal I sat tiredly on the gymnasium floor, watching the traffic through the long windows, the light on the polished but dusty floor. I waited for the bus back to Huddersfield. A few crushed-looking Pakistanis got off it and went away into the cold. From the top deck of the bus I could look down at the monumental stone houses set slightly back off the road, with their flat bare lawns and neat tarmac paths like those in the grounds of a mental home or a crematorium. Factories, cottages, terraces, then a vista of fields opening out to a viaduct; a sudden smell of acetone on the bus.

  That Saturday I said, ‘I think it’s Memphis.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The capital of Louisiana.’

  We were racing the weather down to Miller’s Dale. March is the hinge. There is always the sense that the year might as easily slam shut on it as open.

  PART TWO

  SPRING

  SIX

  Masters of the Modern Dance

  In April I fell off a route at Stanage Edge.

  A new kind of rock boot had come on to the market. Manufactured from the rubber compound used in Formula One tyres, the soles of these boots were supposed to give considerably improved friction on slabs and in all the situations where footwork was important. Their disadvantage was that they were hard to come by; and they were so badly designed they were painful to wear. Some climbers were sceptical about the claims made for them; others believed, it was not clear why, that they should be reserved for experts, ordinary boots being good enough for anyone else. I had some and I wanted to try them out. The suede uppers were a beautiful shade of bluish grey, the laces wine red. I had had a pair of size seven shoe trees in them for a week to stretch them.

  Normal went first.

  The route began with some painful finger-jamming round an undercut, then he had to turn a series of big featureless overhangs which forced him diagonally to the right across the front of the buttress. It was very strenuous. He got some protection in a horizontal break, hissing and puffing with nerves as he hung from his right hand and sorted with his left through the wires and tapes clipped to his harness until he found something that would fit. After that his strength began to fade and his progress was fragmentary, full of stoppages and wrong decisions. ‘You’re on your arms all the time!’ he complained, tucking his feet up under him and scraping at the rock with first one and then the other to try and spread his weight. By the time he had wrestled his way back left and worked out how to use the short finishing crack, his forearms were pumped up like Popeye the Sailor’s, and I had to lower him off on the rope.

  He stood at the bottom, panting and looking up.

  ‘You’re on your arms all the time,’ he repeated.

  He shook his head.

  �
�All the time. It wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for that.’

  He tried twice more but couldn’t do it and came down each time massaging his hands, depressed at the waste of all this energy.

  ‘I’ll get the runners out later,’ he said. ‘I’ll abseil down for them after I’ve had a rest.’

  I was lighter than Normal. I thought I could accept the logic of the rightward movement round the overhangs and not fight against it.

  ‘Leave them in,’ I said. ‘I want to try.’

  He stared at me surprisedly. Then he laughed.

  ‘You and those bloody boots!’

  I shrugged.

  He knew I had never led anything so hard before, and he seemed to be discussing it with himself. ‘I suppose it can’t hurt,’ he said, then: ‘All right, why not? Give it a go.’ He undid from the rope – we were using a doubled nine millimetre – and handed me the end. ‘Get tied on to that before I change my mind.’ He rummaged through his sack until he found the Thermos flask. He always had his tea without milk. ‘You’ll be quite good if you can do anything with the crack,’ he promised me, gazing out over the valley.

  I went round picking up my bits and pieces; I hung them on my harness.

  ‘You won’t need those,’ Normal said. ‘The gear’s good. You could drop a Ford Fiesta on that top runner. You could drop an elephant on it.’

  After all, I thought: I’ve got the boots.

  By then I was planning one or two moves, a show of courage, a graceful retreat. But the undercut gave way as soon as I pulled up and I was so surprised I began to scuttle right as quickly as I could, after the deteriorating handholds. Suddenly it was no effort. I could smell the damp bracken; and the curious spicy odour of the gritstone in front of my face. I could feel the new boots, edging on a tiny quartz pebble, clinging magisterially to nothing; and my hands as they selected and rejected a finger-pocket, a little rib, a large rounded hole like a bucket which worked in the wrong direction to be any use. It was exhilarating. I was the idea or intuition that sat cleverly at the centre of all this, directing it.